Author Archive

hey all, the Unite people have opened up the Flash day to anyone who wants to come. it doesn’t include the conference of course, its JUST the 27th and anyone involved with Flash3D who’s interested in seeing how easy it is to get into Unity3D, this is a great oportunity!

Well I’d been able to fix a few outstanding bugs and make some long overdue enhancements to the component – that’s the very good news.

The bad news is that the component does not work at designtime in CS4 at ALL. The GUI, the rendering – nothing. You *can* see the properties in the inspector, but that’s about it. It *does* compile and work, but of course, what’s the point if you can’t work with it in Design mode?

I have spoken to someone at Adobe (just yesterday as a matter of fact) and they are aware of the issue – not that they know what the problem is, but at least we verified that this was, indeed, a potential bug. So, i’m kinda on the fence on this one.

I’m trying to decide if I should release the CS3 2.1 version now and just see what happens to the CS4 version later. I literally have no idea how many devs are still on CS3. I’d love to hear some feedback on who’s still using CS3 and if my releasing it now would help out.

We just wanted to put out a note about what PapervisionX really is and what it isn’t. There’s been some emails on the list lately talking about it, and we’d rather not leave it up to guessing etc about what it really is and if it’s available etc.

CS4 Branch is not PapervisionX

Ok first things first: the CS4 branch never was PapervisionX. It simply included a renderer that used some of the features of the Flash 10 API. That’s all. The core engine is still very PV2.0 and it was just a sort of testing ground really. It wasn’t meant for production or any type of official release at all. Just merely getting our feet wet. It was, however, encouraging to see people trying it out and getting somewhat excited. That definitely helps motivate the team to see excitement like that!

PapervisionX – what it is

PapervisionX is the next version of Papervision3D built from the ground up based on Flash10’s new 3D api. Ralph and Tim are leading the initial efforts on the core of the engine at the time of this writing (3.16.2009).

We’re going to be handling some things differently with PVX. For starters, no more “beta” titles. We’ll be using dot versioning and will be flushing out a milestone roadmap with features married to those revision numbers. Also, we’re going to be focusing a great deal of energy and effort on our processes. We’re very aware of some of the issues that have been created in 2.0 at various times which caused the engine to be unstable. We’ll be making every effort to keep those times to a minimum in PVX.

PapervisionX – why ?

Flash 10 added a set of native 3D features to the 3D engine. To optimally use them, PapervisionX will be a rearchitectured (from the ground up) version of Papervision3D. This way we can retain the API as much as possible, while taking full advantage of the 3D features of Flash Player 10. This will be mostly beneficial in the areas of quality, speed and file size. To do this, certain parts of the engine needed to be rebuilt, which in turn was enough incentive to have a good look at the entire engine architecture. During this effort we also look at rearchitecturing the engine in other area’s, to make it more flexible (for future Flash Players) and allowing us to use newer Flash technologies, like Adobe Alchemy.

What about PV2.0?

We’re not leaving 2.0 behind just yet. There are still features and changes to the engine we’d like to make and it seems that this version of the engine will largely be the most used for quite some time until FP10’s adoption rate is up to where it needs to be. We’ve also talked about porting certain features and rewrites from PVX to PV2.0. Until the rest of the team can actually work on their features for PVX, we’ll be focusing on 2.0 issues list and features.

When is PVX due out? When can we play??

PVX is still in the early stages of development. Focus, right now, is on the core architecture. We dont have a date right now. However, we’re all aware of how much people want to try it out/test/blog/use for production, and we’re also determined to keep to a schedule. So, while we can’t give any dates right now, we can say that you will see more updates and progress as we go along so you’re not in the dark and wondering. As soon as we have dates that we feel we can meet and hold to, we’ll post them immediately.

Thanks all for your patience and help – PVX is going to be one of the best offerings yet for Flash 3D and I think it’ll blow your socks right off 😉

We’re doing one more of these before the year’s end and won’t likely do it again until February 2009. We weren’t going to do it at all, but we’d had a great response to do one more, so we’re squeezing this one in before the holidays really kick in.

I’m taking a break from traveling for a while, so RMI has set me up with some on-line course time and this weekend (SATURDAY), I’m going to pouring over the Winterwonder Land application and talking about optimization techniques for Papervision and the flash Player in general.

In the course files, I’m including nearly all the demo’s I used for the classes I taught in person as well as the source for Winterwonder Land’s animation engine etc.

Hey all, I’m doing another one of the online training classes this weekend! I’m doing optimization techniques again, but with revised videos. The last ones we’re a bit tough to read and to the folks that took the last one, we’ll be sending an invite to all of you to view the archive of this weekends session which will be MUCH easier to read and see.

I’m going to be showing you how you can take your Papervision3D applications from 3fps to the mid 20’s and beyond! It’s a really good class for beginners, immerdiate and advanced. I’ll be there for the entire class to answer questions and help out. The course includes all source for Winterwonder Land as well as many of the demo files and source I hand out at courses I teach on site.

We’re working to get the documentation on the public api done, and at that point, we’ll release 2.0 as a final.

Also, we’ve changed my role (JohnG) to that of Project Manager. We felt we needed to have one person at least keeping an eye on the big picture for releases and milestones and after voting on it, it was decided. So, we’re going to be putting together milestones for dot releases of the engine and try to remain focused on these new milestones now that the engine is at a stable place under the hood.

Where: New York City (Hotel Pennsylvania – New York City, NY – 401 Seventh Avenue, New York City, New York, 10001 USA

Description:

Official Papervision3D training from the guys who developed Papervision3D. We’ll cover everything to getting you started with Papervision3D to making a fully interactive 3d scene with 3d objects, lights, shaders, textures, are more.